Saturday, April 16, 2005

The Unbearable Smugness of Eurocrats

Three cheers for Chris Deliso, who takes to task Timothy Garton Ash over his empire-mongering op-ed in Thursday's Guardian. Here are just some choice passages:

This tired and all too common argument for empire posits that, left to its own devices, the Balkans will smolder in war and discord for all eternity. Therefore, it is up to the EU – altruistic and benevolent as always – to save the Balkanians from themselves: “...in the Balkans, the choice is Europe or war.”

No, this is the choice as presented by the EU and reverberated endlessly through its echo chamber in the Western media...

The overly simplistic (though entirely fitting for the task at hand) impression left by Ash is of a whole part of Europe ruined by one civilization. Further, the whole of the Balkans must be brought in to the fold by August 2014 – to create a majestic symbolic spectacle out of the one-hundred year anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I...

Considering that the EU has always, politically at least, been characterized far more by symbolism than substance, it is not surprising that they would set such grandiose but in reality meaningless goals for themselves. With the pace of this remorseless expansion, and the increasing grumblings it’s causing in the established countries of the union, it can only be hoped that the great anniversary will also mark the death of the European Union itself.

This imperialistic mindset, Deliso says, is partly a product of imperialist legacy, and partly a solipsistic dream of Eurocrats; the ruling class in European capitals and their satellite principalities who have a vested interest in creating a continental über-state: money, power, prestige, perks - easy living at someone else's expense. As I've pointed out before, there is no need for Balkans countries to join the EU; the tyrannical kleptocratic future is already here, and how!